Faculty who do research in hearing science and its applications came together from several schools and colleges to form the Hearing Research Center (HRC) at Boston University. This proposal requests support for research core facilities that will support ongoing funded research, stimulate interactions among HRC faculty in different laboratories, and allow more efficient collaboration and utilization of resources. The requested core support is designed to promote integrative, multi- disciplinary collaborations involving auditory physiology, psychophysics, and modeling. Support for three core facilities is requested: a sound-field laboratory facility, a scientific core faculty, and an engineering core facility. The sound-field facility would provide a controlled, reverberant environment and allow common setups and stimuli in psychoacoustic measurements. The scientific core facility would provide specialized support from a histologist and an animal care specialist. The histologist would support the faculty and students in all of the physiology laboratories, and the animal care specialist would provide assistance with lab animals, including transportation and specialized care, and allow the creation of a quiet environment in the existing campus-wide animal care facility. The engineering core facility would allow the archiving and analysis of data from groups working in different disciplines, the integration of modeling efforts that are distributed across different laboratories in different disciplines, the integration of modeling efforts that are distributed across different laboratories and at different levels of the auditory pathways, and provide general computer and technical support to all faculty and laboratories in the Center. These cores and the support they will provide were designed specifically to remove impediments to efficient collaborations.